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Monday, July 2, 2018

Hungarian Jews see anti-Semitism as a serious problem, survey finds

Two-thirds of Hungarian Jews believe anti-Semitism is a serious problem in their country, according to a new survey, though fewer than half say they have experienced it firsthand.

The survey, which the prominent sociologists András Kovács and Ildikó Barna conducted in 2017 through face-to-face interviews with 1,879 Jewish adults, was published Thursday at a news conference in Budapest. It is a follow-up to a 1999 survey of Hungarian Jews that asked about perceptions on a range of topics.

On anti-Semitism, 48 percent of the respondents said they heard anti-Semitic rhetoric on the street in the year preceding the survey, down from 75% in 1999. The number of respondents who said they had experienced at least three instances of anti-Semitism was 6%, compared to 16% in 1999.

However, asked to quantify the extent of anti-Semitism in Hungary, 55% of the respondents said it was “great” and another 10% said it was “very great.”

“In 2017, the situation was perceived as much worse than it had been perceived in 1999,” the authors of the survey wrote.